Nicholson Baker: U and I: A True Story

with people you feel this complicatedly about, you should wait until they are dead, because then the fact that they are lost to you — that they aren’t potentially on the other end of any piece of print — makes you value them so much more and more truly. Now I would have crabby things to say.…

See, Barthelme’s death changed my mind completely. It felt positively contemptible now to wait until a writer has died to exercise one’s best powers on his work — such a delay indeed seemed to me post-Barthelme to go directly counter to one of the principal aims of the novel itself, which is to capture pieces of mental life as truly as possible, as they unfold, with all the surrounding forces of circumstance that bear on a blastula of understanding allowed to intrude to the extent that they give a more accurate picture. The commemorative essay that pops up in some periodical, full of sad-clown sorrowfulness the year following the novelist’s death (as in Henry James’s essays on Zola and Trollope, or his long review of the first biography of Emerson), is unworthy of the fine-tuned descriptive capacities of the practicing novelist: confronted for once by a character in life that he actually does have the possibility to understand, given the daily literary regimen and tastes he shares with his subject, he instead lazily waits for the fixity of the autopsy table before doing a likeness. A beginning novelist like me is charged with describing life now, not writing history; and the huge contribution that the books by a senior living writer make to his life requires in its importance some attempt at a novelistically inclusive response.

I knew now that I had a real deadline: I had to write about Updike while people could still conceivably sneer at him simply for being at the top of the heap, before any false valedictory grand-old-man reverence crept in, as it inevitably would. The literary world demanded some sort of foreign-ness as the price of its attention: failing geographical distance, senile remoteness would do. But what it lost in this demand was the possibility for real self-knowledge; for you can never come up with truths of an acceptable resolution if what you select for study is estranged by time or language or background or by a physiognomy in its authoritative, slow-talking decline. I would study my feelings for Updike while he was still in that phase of intellectual neglect that omnipresence and best-selling popularity inspire.

I began that morning to put down phrases or scenes I remembered from Updike’s writing, just as they occurred to me. The first one was

vast, dying sea

I put an asterisk in front of those items, like the couple spitting at each other in Marry Me , that were bad memories. It was an odd sensation: a particular item would arrive about once every ten seconds, not without some eyes-closed searching, separated from its predecessor in the list by a mental blur similar to the fast camera pan that separated scenes in old Batman shows. It felt as though I could continue typing these discrete, often phrasal memories of Updike for days. Some of the others in the train were:

(2) Mom reading Too Far to Go in a hotel when we were visiting some family — maybe around the time she and Dad had decided on a divorce

(5) The Chateau Mouton Rotschild [

sic

] that the man gives the kid in Updike’s first story

(6) ‘The blue below is ultramarine. Sometimes the blue below is green.’ Misquoted

(7) The Bulgarian Poetess, title — and some sense of her: pulled back hair, ‘coiffed.’

(10) The ice cube in Rabbit, Run

(14) ‘and the sad curve of time it subtends,’ dedication in Problems

(16) *‘Seems’ or ‘seemed’—constantly used word

(17) Leeches climbing up legs in some short story

(20) Divot the size of an undershirt, that made Mom laugh so hard that Sunday.

I had a list of about thirty-five of these by the time I had to stop writing that morning and drive with my family to the zoo. But I did nothing with it. Instead I wrote a review of a biography of Flann O’Brien and an essay on model airplanes: frivolity. In mid-October my great uncle Dick committed suicide, overwhelmed by various incurable afflictions. My grandmother said that she felt very alone now, with nobody to tell her family memories to who would respond with supplemental ones of his own; and she quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes: “the last leaf upon the tree.” The letter from him that I now never had to answer (his very first to me) rested at the top of a prioritized (and why not use that word if it is handy?) pile of correspondence that I had been guiltily eyeing for months. In it he mentions that he has read something of mine with “his sighted eye,” and closes with: “I don’t ask forgiveness for my poor penmanship — merely an understanding of a less than easy task.” My wife stood in the middle of a different rug (we were back home by this time, done house-sitting) with round eyes, saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Again, in reaction, I felt the luck of being Updike’s contemporary, but I did nothing with it.

Finally, a week or so later, on October 24, 1989, I read this in Henry James’s long essay on Emerson:

It was impossible to be more honoured and cherished, far and near, than he was during his long residence in Concord, or more looked upon as the principal gentleman in the place. This was conspicuous to the writer of these remarks on the occasion of the curious, sociable, cheerful public funeral made for him in 1883 by all the countryside, arriving, as for the last honours to the first citizen, in trains, in waggons, on foot, in multitudes. It was a popular manifestation, the most striking I have ever seen provoked by the death of a man of letters.

Immediately I tried to picture what sort of “popular manifestation” there would be at Updike’s funeral. Would the frumpy gathering of professional scribes be swelled by the modern equivalents of countryfolk: that is, secretaries, books-on-tape commuters, subscribers to the Franklin Library, members of Quality Paperback Book Club? The notion of all those thoughtful, likable, furrowed, middlebrow brows lowered in sadness seemed momentarily strange, after all of Updike’s lively and shocking and un-Emersonian writing about nakedness, fucking in piles of laundry, pubic hair like seaweed, dirty Polaroids, his next-door-neighbor’s pussy, and the rest — but then it seemed absolutely right. Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose. Once the sensation of the interior of a vagina has been compared to a ballet slipper (if my memory doesn’t distort that unlocatable simile) the sexual revolution is complete: just as Emerson made the Oversoul, the luminous timeless sphere of pure thought, available to the earnest lecture-going farm worker, so Updike made the reader’s solitary paperback-inspired convulsion an untrashy, cultivated attainment. (I myself have never successfully masturbated to Updike’s writing, though I have to certain remembered scenes in Iris Murdoch; but someone I know says that she achieved a number of quality orgasms from Couples when she first read it at age thirteen.) In grieving for Updike, the somber, predominantly female citizens would be grieving for their own youthful sexual pasts, whose hard-core cavortings were now insulated by wools and goose downs of period charm, vague remorse, fuzzy remembrance, spousal forgiveness, and an overall sense of imperfect attempts at cutting loose; they would be mourning the man who, by bringing a serious, Prousto-Nabokovian, morally sensitive, National-Book-Award-winning prose style to bear on the micromechanics of physical lovemaking, first licensed their own moans. But the concrete visual image of mourners in contemporary dress gathered around a real grave was too powerful and distasteful to contemplate for more than an instant; recoiling, I thought, But if he dies, he won’t know how I feel about him , and was horrified. That night I wrote inside the back cover of the Henry James paperback I’d been reading, “Make Updike thing into long essay,” and the next day, trembling, I called the editor of The Atlantic to propose it to him.